You only have to put a baby near a bookshelf or a toddler up a tree to know that humans like to climb. In Victorian times, the ascent, like so many other things, was formalised. New techniques and bits of equipment appeared – the belay, the ice-axe. The romantic alpinists who climbed mountains such as the Matterhorn and Wetterhorn gave way to larger expeditions; the British using their global status to overpower assorted peaks in Asia, Africa and South America. A group of sportsmen, usually chosen because of their skill at something like rowing or pig-sticking, would lay siege to a mountain with the help of hundreds of local porters, as if it were a military operation to establish full-spectrum dominance over the landscape, and when the summit had been stabbed by a Union flag, eat quails' eggs and pop champagne. The supplies taken on the victorious Everest ascent of 1953 "included mortars and bombs so that a feu de joie could be fired off when conquest was assured".

The italics belong to Jim Perrin, who dislikes these lumbering, imperial expeditions. For him, the ideal approach was the lightweight, heroic, low-impact strategy of Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, the great climbing duo of the interwar years, and "the entire insouciant, happy-go-lucky, minimal and self-reliant style of their mountain vagabondage". Not entirely convincingly, he sees them poking the hidebound climbing establishment in the eye time and again. With their matching plosive names, Shipton and Tilman certainly seem more demotic, more 21st century, than those who came before – such as Mummery or Mallory. Although their style was cool-contemporary, living off bamboo shoots and forest mushrooms rather than tins of foie gras, they both came from the kind of background where a gentleman might take six months off to bag a peak. To say, as Perrin does, that Tilman regarded his Sherpa porters as "equal partners" is disingenuous; his preference for their company over that of anyone at home had more to do with his misanthropy, which itself was probably the result of horrifying experiences during three youthful years on the western front.

The pair met while growing coffee in Kenya Colony, Shipton having learned the ropes at a young age in the Alps under the influence of an English woman, Nea Bernard. Perrin gives a fine description of an early trip to Mount Kenya, the older climber tumbling from a snow-covered ledge and Shipton descending "a narrow gully with the whole weight of Tilman 120 feet beneath dangling from the rope tied round both their waists, until finally the unconscious man came to rest on a ledge out of sight of his leader". Their friendship was not close, or at least was not articulated, but together they became a legend, inspiring contemporaries with reports and photos of mysterious passes and peaks in the Himalayas and the Karakorams. Shipton and Tilman serves up great chunks of letter and diary like pemmican. When Tilman reached the top of Nanda Devi in 1936 with Noel Odell, it would be more than a decade before anyone else climbed higher. "I believe we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands upon it," he wrote.

The author's great strength is his knowledge of climbing, which gives him an insight into the psychology and practice of mountain exploration. Perrin thinks much recent writing about such matters has "tended to the external", and he enjoys clouting "Everest historians – among the straw-grasping, speculative ranks of whom non-climbers are legion". Throughout the book, he conducts a cantankerous running conversation with the reader via footnotes, correcting the supposed errors of others, targeting "societal authority", po-faced commentators, "the phoney-adventurer and yacht-polishing fraternities", that old standby health and safety, and even "newly Oxbridge-graduated subeditors" at the Guardian. It is apparent that Perrin would have no trouble starting an argument in an empty room. He quotes a line from Eric Shipton about the moon shedding "silver light over a scene of ravishing loveliness", before bringing himself up short: "The style police would not, of course, allow you to write in this manner these days."

Sometimes, he is plain wrong. The idyllic countryside around Cranborne Chase was integral to Shipton's imagination (the spire of Salisbury cathedral pops up repeatedly at high altitude), and Perrin attacks the destruction there "of the former rural communities by the ingress of second-home-owners and metropolitan escapees". But village schools on the Wiltshire-Dorset border that a generation ago were empty are now oversubscribed, and, in my experience, most of the incomers already have a connection with the West Country.

This story of Britain's mountaineering cult is stuffed with figures peripheral to literature, including the father of Virginia Woolf and characters such as Dorothy Pilley, who was married to the influential critic IA Richards, and the brothers of the poets Stephen Spender and WH Auden.

Shipton and Tilman focuses on the 1930s. Later, Shipton married, had children, became a diplomat or spy in Kashgar, in China, and was ousted as leader of the 1953 ascent of Mount Everest in a committee coup, which the author describes with characteristic overkill as a "squalid and bloody little episode". Tilman fought behind enemy lines in Albania and the Dolomites, and, in old age, sailed pilot cutters in cold, remote seas. They died within months of each other in 1977, one from cancer, the other in the waters of the Antarctic. Perrin likes Shipton's approach to climbing and leadership, but his real admiration is kept for Tilman, who he sees, probably rightly, as having one of the most adventurous lives of the 20th century – a silent man who avoided intimate contact, he reached the furthest limits of human endurance in war, on the mountains and at sea.

Shipton and Tilman sets itself up in opposition to conventional accounts. It is nostalgic, without being in the least bit impressed by "the class-based mythologising of early British climbing"; it collects detail, such as a confession by the broadcaster Sir Jack Longland that, while a Cambridge freshman, he conducted simultaneous affairs with the one-legged mountaineering poet Geoffrey Winthrop Young and his wife Len, who was a founder of the Pinnacle Club for women climbers. By the time I reached the summit and conquered – I mean, completed – the book, I had grown fond of Perrin. Like a harrumphing, discursive companion on a long walk over tough terrain, his grouchy presence became reassuring. He knew Tilman in old age, once telling him he was a "crotchety old bugger" – and receiving "a wry smile of assent". I will echo the compliment, and might so far forget myself as to shake hands upon it.